Smithsonian.com

The time has come for the Royal College of Art in England to put on RCA Secret, its annual contemporary art fundraiser with an anonymous twist.

The school commissions 2,500 postcard-sized artworks from famous artists, as well as from its own art students. The artists create up to four offerings and put their signatures on the back of each card.

Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin participate almost every year. Original works from David Hockney, Yoko Ono and Christo have also been submitted in the past. Designer Manolo Blahnik, Paul McCartney and director Mike Leigh have all contributed as well.

But the big catch is that when the cards go on sale the identity of each artist is kept secret.

For a week leading up to the opening, the cards are available for viewing on the RCA Web site and in person at the college. In years past, the public would stand in line for days outside the school for a chance to get a ticket to the exhibition/sale. (This year it has raffled off the first 50 admission tickets, and then it is first come, first served.)

The lucky walk-in arrives to this artistic masquerade with a list of paintings, by number, that they would love to own. They can choose up to four. Each painting costs approximately $80; an incredible deal considering some of these works have been resold for thousands of dollars.

After the purchase is made, the moment of truth arrives. The buyer gets to flip over each painting and finds out if their blind bet paid off.

Initially I wasn’t too wary of the up-and-running Louis Vuitton boutique in the middle of Takashi Murakami’s retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Modern Art Notes rang the alarm bell early, but it’s not like commercial enterprise didn’t have a place in the artist’s career before now.

A good deal of Murakami’s time has been spent developing his commercial art studio, KaiKai Kiki LLC. He has designed more than 500 mass-produced items, including cell phone caddies, key chains, stationery and t-shirts. When he was just starting out he even branded himself as “first in quality around the world,” appropriating the logo of a model kit company in Japan.

Artistically Murakami is at his best when he riffs on popular culture and products using high-art traditions. He’s heavily influenced by Japanese cartoon and comic illustration featured in anime and manga publications, but also incorporates 12th-century Japanese scroll painting techniques in his work. All in all, the collaboration with Louis Vuitton seemed like a fairly organic offshoot of Murakami’s established artistic acumen.

What has me bothered is the lack of distinction being made between art and objects of consumption. Paul Schimmel, curator of the Murakami show, was quoted in ArtNews last month as saying “I liked the idea of addressing the commercial work as rigorously as the so-called high art.”

I would disagree that putting this season’s must-have Louis bag in the middle of an art exhibition, no matter how strong the relevant ties to design or fashion, demands the same intellectual rigor needed to evaluate the rest of the show.

Schimmel continues, “…the experience of purchasing the luxury goods has an emotional resonance in the same way you have an experience seeing a great painting or sculpture.”

What a misunderstanding. Art is a catalyst—for thought, for reaction, for emotion, for change. That is where the power of an art object lies. The object itself is secondary. Price tagging art and putting it on the same plane as a shopping spree is shortsighted and a bit silly, because the endgame of true consumption is deterioration, destruction and obliteration. Art is just not subject to the same vagaries.

(“Army of Mushrooms”)

It must be one of life’s little jokes that Louise Bourgeois’s surname is synonymous with mediocrity, because her artwork is anything but.

This weekend that fact was reinforced to me. The Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston has put on a modest-sized show, “Bourgeois in Boston,” of the artist’s sculptures, prints, drawings and even an early painting (a rare inclusion for Bourgeois, who is known foremost for her three-dimensional forms). The venue was relatively small, but the short checklist did not hinder the impact of the exhibition.

After looking at only a few works, it becomes obvious that Bourgeois’s art is compelling because it’s simultaneously personal and symbolic. On par with Frida Kahlo’s work in terms of its autobiographical engagement, Bourgeois’s oeuvre is an open book when it comes to the her life.

Her close relationship to her mother; childhood traumas; her preoccupation with the body and sexuality; and her father’s infamous ten-year liaison with Bourgeois’s live-in governess—every one of these intimate disclosures finds its way into her work.

But at the same time, the viewer is never put off or alienated by the sharing of such intimacies. The artist’s highly developed symbolism turns diary confessions into so much more. A strong example of this is how Bourgeois’s tenderness for her mother is manifested through the personification of the spider, one of the artist’s most enduring symbols.

In Bourgeois’s hands, the threatening arachnid body becomes a sheltering, protective haven. As a weaver and spinner, the spider is also a source of fragile creativity and inspiration, quite a fitting homage to the artist’s literal originator and expressive muse.

Until January 2008, the National Gallery of Art will host timeless works from an odd couple: JMW Turner, the English romantic painter of the sublime, and Edward Hopper, the quintessential American artist of the quotidian.

Turner painted grand scenes from literary sources: bloody battles and infamous shipwrecks immersed in sensual glowing color, tumultuous brush strokes and thick impastos of paint. The exhibit of his watercolors and oil paintings span his entire career, and only one painting depicts London, Turner’s home, a distant city veiled by the murkiness of a new industrial age. Hopper, meanwhile, paints iconic scenes of early 20th-century New England and New York City: lighthouses, eerily quiet street corners, empty buildings and nighthawks at a diner.

Where Turner preferred a diffused atmospheric light, Hopper painted a light raking over solid forms, which would wash away all fussiness from his imagery. Turner was a maestro with paint, conducting it in ways still unmatched by any human hand. Hopper, however, struggled to find his form until he was in his 40’s, and even his masterpieces have awkward touches that contribute to the undeniable tension in his work. Turner was a member of the official academy by the age of 26 and moved swiftly from watercolor to oil to gain prestige as an artist. Yet Hopper painted a self-portrait wearing a hat and a tie. He could be a salesman or a businessman, and he liked to present himself that way.

JMW Turner courted controversy and fame in England with his daring subject matter and revolutionary painting style. Later, in bustling New York City, Edward Hopper found iconic status slowly and surreptitiously, finding timelessness in the mundane.

For artists in truly adverse circumstances, notebook drawings have proven to be essential tools for survival. Consider American Indian ledger books of the Great Plains. About 200 copies survive to this day; the Plains Indian Ledger Project seeks to digitize these precious works online.

Between 1860 and 1900, the U.S. government forced Plains Indians onto reservations. Schools opened up with an insidious doctrine: children had to wear American garb and speak English. Cultural extinction loomed. Plains Indians had always relied on oral storytelling rather than the written word to weave together their history. In a few generations, their languages and collective culture would be lost.

Many Plains Indian tribes preserved their history by drawing and painting on buffalo hides. In the Northern Plains, artists of the Lakota tribe created winter counts, which reduced a linear calendar year into a significant event, represented in a drawing. Each year began with the first snowfall. The Lakota knew 1833 to 1834 as “storm of stars winter,” depicted as a tipi under a starry sky by the Lakota artist Brown Hat. Collected together, the winter counts tell the history of a people with poetic economy.

On reservations, Plains artists adapted to their newfound circumstances. Without buffalo hide and bone for painting, they drew with tools from a foreign culture: pen, pencil and crayons upon accountant books, diaries and other notebooks. They gleaned pencil and paper from the used notebooks of unwitting U.S. soldiers or sympathetic government workers who encouraged them to tell their tales.

Ledger art assumes an astonishing array of forms: children’s school book drawings; documents of war battles and reservation life; and, finally, dream narratives (a technique shown in this stunning sequence of drawings by Black Hawk, Chief Medicine Man of the Sioux).

One ledger book has garnered particular interest because its authenticity has been questioned. Found in Texas beneath the floorboards of a house, this book reveals a collaboration between John Green Kelly, the child of a white Comanche captive woman, who was then raised as a Comanche, and Tatsen, an exiled Kiowa-Apache Medicine Man. One page of the ledger book shows the traditional tipi and stars pictograph for 1833 to 1834 with cursive text: “On this occasion falling stars filled the sky like a swarm of lightning bugs. To Tatsen this was the Spirit Talk of Death for it seemed a certainty Heaven itself would fall.”

(Courtesy of Eugene and Clare Thaw Collection, New York Historical Association, Cooperstown, New York)